Extra-alarm fire ignited by space heater

An extra-alarm fire caused by a space heater broke out in the Back of the Yards neighborhood Monday night, according to authorities.

The fire started after 10 p.m. in the 5200 block of South Lowe Avenue when a curtain next to a space heater caught fire, a spokesman for the Chicago Fire Department said. About a dozen people were displaced.

Two people were being evaluated by paramedics - a man from the room where the curtain caught fire and a woman on oxygen from a neighboring building that caught fire.

"He woke up to the curtain being on fire and got out," Chicago Fire Department Spokesman Larry Langford said. "He was fine. We called an ambulance for him because he's out there with no clothes on basically and they got him someplace warm before he turned into a patient."

Crews will be out into the morning poking around the building looking for where the fire may have spread but the main body of the fire was extinguished before midnight, Langford said.

Weather didn't complicate the fighting of the fire, he said, but it does make clean-up afterward more difficult.

Crews expected to encounter frozen hydrants but it didn't happen at this fire, he said.

"They've been cracking all the hydrants and making sure they're guzzled well the last couple shifts," Langford said.

Recovering hose after a fire can be difficult when it's so cold, Langford said.

"When they shut down the lines and don't open them up fast enough, it starts to freeze, starts to get stiff," he said. "You got to make sure you don't let a hose sit there too long."

Firefighters sometimes will leave a hose out with just a little water running through it until they can get it rolled up.

"As soon as you're done, you sut the water down, you start breaking the joints and rolling it up and forcing the water out of it before it freezes."